The Edge Of Enclosure

Abstract

Concealment is tempting. I hide from you; you seek me out. What happens when concealment becomes a matter of space, the kinds of space where I hide, and where, perhaps, I seek to be sought? This is what Stacey D’Erasmo describes in A Seahorse Year when Hal, a San Francisco accountant, is confronted with the hidden spectacle of a new lover’s back: “Though he has seen Dan’s naked back, he’s very compelled at the moment by the hidden length of it within the shirt: Dan’s back, concealed. It is as if he is standing, blindfolded, before a major work of art.”1 Not only is concealment compelling; it’s compelling in an explicitly aesthetic way. Art would seem to name, here, the place where the hidden becomes sensible, where the eyes fail, drop, or are folded out of sight. After all, it is not Dan’s back that is blindfolded here—what would it mean to speak of a blindfolded back?—but instead, Hal’s eyes. Blindness and folding must be thought together. The limit between Hal and Dan closes like an eye, but it also brings them close. This limit is as simple as a shirt. It is what in the following pages will come to be called enclosure.